Legaspi: Typhoon Hagupit has weakened as it continues to slowly sweep across the Philippines, but the flood watch is still on in many areas due to heavy downpour.
At least 21 people have been killed mostly due to flooding in Samar island, according to the Red Cross.
But it does not appear to have been as severe as many had feared.
The Typhoon triggered one of the largest evacuations seen in peacetime, as up to a milolion people have taken shelter in evacuation centres.
Manila remains under a 24-hour alert for floods and storm surges.
Media reports say Hagupit is nowhere near as powerful as Typhoon Haiyan, which killed thousands of people in November 2013.
In Tacloban, badly hit by Typhoon Haiyan, roofs have been blown away by Hagupit and streets are flooded, but the area has escaped the wider devastation of last year.
"There were no bodies scattered on the road, no big mounds of debris," Rhea Estuna told the Associated Press by phone from Tacloban. "Thank God this typhoon wasn't as violent.''
Better prepared
A Tacloban city official saod the immediate task was assessing damage to the temporary shelters in which some people have been living. The official said the weather was good now but that high tides were making it harder for waterways to drain, despite work to clear debris.
Some damage to infrastructure - including power outages - has been reported.
At 04:00 on Monday (20:00 GMT on Sunday), the storm was 110km (70 miles) northwest of Masbate City with maximum sustained winds of 120km/h (75mph) near the centre and gusts of up to 150km/h, government forecaster Pagasa said. It was forecast to move northwest at 10km/h.
At its height, as it approached land on Saturday, gusts of up to 250km/h were recorded.
Authorities say they were better prepared than when Haiyan struck in 2013, and organised the largest peacetime evacuation in the history of the Philippines.
As the supertyphoon pummeled the country for three days, the streets were deserted in this central Philippines city.
Justin Morgan, Oxfam country director for the Philippines, said that a key factor was a greater focus on the dangers of storm surges and hence the the movement of people away from coastal areas.
Joey Salceda, governor of Albay province, told the BBC no casualties and only "negligible damage" had been reported in his province.
He said the storm had been identified as a threat in late November, giving officials time to identify population at risk, evacuate them two days ahead of the storm and prepare food supplies.
Coastal communities hit
Hagupit tore did tear apart homes in coastal communities across the eastern Philippines, creating more misery for millions following a barrage of deadly disasters.
A baby girl died of hypothermia in central Iloilo province on Saturday at the height of the typhoon, a government spokesman said at a news conference.
Two women were injured when the tricycle taxi they were riding was struck by a falling tree in central Negros Oriental province.
The wind strength at landfall made Hagupit the most powerful storm to hit the Philippines this year, exceeding a typhoon in July that killed more than 100 people.
“Many houses, especially in the coastal areas, were blown away by strong winds,” Stephanie Uy-Tan, the mayor of Catbalogan, a city on Samar, told AFP by phone on Sunday morning.
“Trees and power lines were toppled, tin roofs were blown off and there is flooding.”
Fearful of a repeat of last year when Super Typhoon Haiyan claimed more than 7,350 lives, the government undertook a massive evacuation effort ahead of Hagupit that saw millions of people seek shelter.
Three days of strong winds
Hopes of avoiding a mass disaster were raised when Hagupit’s maximum wind gusts dropped sharply to 170km/h, with sustained winds of 140km/h, on Sunday morning.
Hagupit was forecast to take three days to cut across the Philippines, passing over mostly poor central regions, and authorities were still preparing for worst-case scenarios.
The government warned of storm surges up to five metres high in some areas, flash flooding, landslides and winds strong enough to tear apart even sturdy homes.
Tens of millions of others live in the typhoon’s path, including those in the central Philippines who are still struggling to recover from the devastation of Haiyan, which hit 13 months ago.
Haiyan was the strongest storm ever recorded on land, with winds of 315km/h. It generated tsunami-like storm surges that ravaged entire towns.
In Tacloban, one of the cities worst-hit by Haiyan, palm-thatch temporary houses built by aid agencies for survivors of last year’s typhoon had been torn apart, vice mayor Jerry Yaokasin told AFP.
However there was no repeat of the storm surges that did the most damage during Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda.
Sigh of relief
“There is a collective sigh of relief. The initial assessment is that there are no casualties. We were better prepared after Haiyan (locally known as Yolanda), people were packed in evacuation centres,” Yaokasin said.
“But the transitional shelters made of nipa (palm thatch) were blown away. Our biggest challenge is how to provide for those who were displaced because of that.”
In the eastern region of Bicol that was due to be hit throughout Sunday and Monday, hundreds of thousands were huddling in schools, churches and other official evacuation centres.
“We’re terrified the water will rise up. This is the nearest safe place, so we came here,” Karen Baraham, an ice cream vendor who lives in a creekside slum, told AFP as she sought shelter in a politician’s three-storey office.
Climate change storms
The Philippines endures about 20 major storms a year which, along with regular earthquakes and volcano eruptions, make it one of the world’s most disaster-plagued countries.
The storms regularly claim many lives and are becoming more violent and unpredictable because of climate change, according to the United Nations and many scientists.
At global climate talks in Peru, Filipino activists said the frequency of typhoons had settled any debate in the Philippines about whether man-made global warming exists.
“In the hour of our peril, now is the time for politicians to back up their expressions of solidarity with real action at the UN climate talks,” said Jasper Inventor of Greenpeace. “It has become an issue of our survival.”
Haiyan was the world’s deadliest natural disaster last year.
In 2011 and 2012, there were consecutive December storms in the Philippines that together claimed more than 3,000 lives and were the world’s deadliest natural disasters of those years.
